Lillian recognized the Doctor only when he spoke. He was costumed as an Aztec warrior, face and body painted, and he was carrying a sharp-pointed lance, with sharp arrows slung across his ck. It was his turn to inflict deep wounds, like those he was weary of healing. That night his appearance forbade all women to rest their heads upon his shoulder and confess their difficulties. Before they crumpled into wailing children, he would challenge the potential mistress.
When Diana arrived with Christmas walking in her shadow, the Doctor said: “When patients suffer from malnutrition of the senses, I send them to Diana.”
Diana, her head emerging from the empty picture frame, wearing a violet face mask and her hair covered with sea weed, was dancing with Christmas.
Christmas was dressed quite fittingly, as a man from another planet, but such affirmation of distance did not discourage Diana. She kissed him, and the frame fell around both their shoulders like a life belt to keep them afloat on the unfamiliar sea of the senses, its swell heightened by the jazz and the fireworks.
A couple was leaning over the railing, and Lillian could hear the woman say: “Even if you don’t mean it, just for tonight, say you love me. I won’t ever remind you of it; I will not see you again, but just for tonight say you love me, say you love me.”
Would such a guarantee of freedom from responsibility make of any man a lover and a poet? Bring about a lyrical confession? In the green flare of a fireworks fountain, Lillian saw that the man hesitated to create illusion even for one night, and she thought, “He should have been disguised as the greatest of all misers!”
The woman in quest of illusion disappeared among the dancers.
Everyone was already dancing the intricate patterns of the mambo, which not only set bodies in motion but generated words which would not have been said without such propulsions.
The Doctor was transformed by his disguise; Lillian was astonished to watch him in the role of ruthless lover who would deal only in wounds in the war of love, none of the consolations. He had separated Diana from Christmas with some ironic remarks, and caused another woman to sit alone among the cordage piled in circles on the deck like sleeping anacondas.
It was not only the champagne Lillian drank, it was the softness of the night so palpable that when she opened her mouth she felt as if she had swallowed some of it: it descended into her arteries like a new drug not yet discovered by the alchemists. She swallowed the softness, and then swallowed the showers of light from the fireworks too, and felt illumined by them. It was not only the champagne, but the merry cries of the native boys diving for silver pieces around the yacht, and then climbing on the anchor chain to watch the festivities.
There were many Golcondas—one above the horizon, dark hills wearing necklaces of shivering lights, one reflected on the satin-surfaced bay, one of oil lamps from the native huts, one of candlelights, one of cold neon lights, the neon cross on the church, the neon eyes of the future, without warmth at all—but all of them looked equally beautiful when their reflections fell into the water.
Doctor Hernandez was dancing with a woman who reminded n of Man Ray’s painting of a mouth: a giant mouth that took up all of the canvas. The young man the woman had discarded in order to dance with the Doctor seemed disoriented. Lillian noticed his pallor. Drunkenness? Sorrow? Jealousy? Loneliness?
She said to him: “Do you remember in all the Coney Islands of the world a slippery turntable on which we all tried to sit? As it turned more swiftly people could no longer hold onto the highly waxed surface and they slid off.”
“The secret is to spit on your hands.”
“Then let’s both spit on our hands right now,” she said, and the manner in which he compressed his mouth made her fear he would be angry. “We both slipped off at the same moment.”
His smile was so forced that it came as a grimace. The cries of the diving boys, the narcotic lights, the carnival of fireworks and dancing feet, no longer reached them, and they recognized the similarity of their mood.
“Every now and then, at a party, in the middle of living, I get this feeling that I have slipped off,” she said, “that I am becalmed, that I have struck a snag… I don’t know how to put it.”
“I have that feeling all the time, not now and then. How would you like to escape altogether? I have a beautiful house in an ancient city, only four hours from here. My name is Michael Lomax. I know your name, I have heard you play.”
In the jeep she fell asleep. She dreamed of a native guide with a brown naked torso, who stood at the entrance to an Aztec tomb. Holding a machete, he said: “Would you like to visit the tomb?”
She was about to refuse his invitation when she awakened because the jeep was acting like a camel on the rough road. She heard the hissing of the sea.
“How old are you, Michael?”
He laughed at this: “I’m twenty-nine and you’re about thirty, so you need not use such a protective tone.”
“Adolescence is like cactus,” she said, and fell asleep again.
And she began dreaming of a Chirico painting: endless vistas of ruined columns and ghostly figures either too large, like ancient Greek statues, or too small as they sometimes appeared in dreams.
But she was not dreaming. She was awake and driving at dawn through the cobblestones of an ancient city.
Not a single house complete. The ruins of a once sumptuous baroque architecture, still buried in the silence it had been in since the volcano had erupted and half buried it in ashes and lava.
The immobility of the people, the absence of wind, gave it a static quality.
The Indians lived behind the scarred walls quietly, like mourners of an ancient splendor. The lie of each family took place in an inner patio, and, as they kept the shutters closed on the street side, the city had the deserted aspect of a ghost town.
Rows of columns no longer supporting roofs, churches open to a vaulted sky, a coliseum’s empty seats watching in the arena the spectacle of mutilated statues toppled by the victorious lava. A convent without doors, the nun’s cells, prisons, secret stairways exposed.
“Here is my house,” said Michael. “It was once a convent attached to the church. The church, by the way, is an historic monument, what’s left of it.”
They crossed the inner patio with its music of fountains and entered a high-ceilinged white stucco room. Dark wood beams, blood-red curtains, and wrought-iron grilles on the windows gave the dramatic contrasts which are the essence of Spanish life, a conflict between austerity and passion, poetry and discipline. The high walls gave purity and elevation, the rich, voluptuous, red primitive ardor; dark wood gave the somber nobilities; the iron grilles symbolized the separation from the world which made individuality grow intensely as it did not grow when all barriers of quality and evaluations were removed.
The church bells tolled persistently although there was no ritual to be attended, as if calling day and night to the natives buried by the volcano’s eruption years before.
Walking through the muted streets of the place with Michael, Lillian wondered how the Spaniards and the Mayans now lived quietly welded, with no sign of their past warring visible to the outsider. Whatever opposition remained was so subtle and indirect that neither Spaniards nor visitors were aware of it. Michael repeated many times: “The Indians are the most stubborn people.”
In the dark, slumbering eyes, white people could never find a flicker of approbation. The Indians expressed no open hostility, merely silence whenever white people approached them, and their glazed obsidian eyes had the power of reflecting without revelation of feelings, as if they had themselves become their black lacquered pottery. White people would explain how they wanted a meal cooked, a house built, a dress made. In the Indian eyes there was a complete lack of adhesion, in their smiles a subtle mockery of the freakish ways of all visitors, ancient or modern. The Indians would work for these visitors, but disregard their eccentricity and disobey them with what appeared to be ignorance or lack of understanding, but which was in reality an enormous passive resistance to change, which enabled them to preserve their way of life against all outside influences.